“Maggie,” he said quietly. His voice sounded rough. “Hello, young lady.”
She nodded at him a little.
Ebenezar nodded back. Then he turned to me, and an anger I had never seen before smoldered in his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak.
Before he could, I gave him a warning glance and said, “How about we go up to the garden, and Mouse can stretch his legs?”
“Okay,” Maggie said.
The old man glared daggers at me. Then schooled his expression and turned back to my daughter with a gentle smile. “That sounds nice,” he said.
I stood with Ebenezar and watched Maggie and Mouse play with svartalf children.
The garden was gorgeous, centered on a couple of trees that grew in the courtyard in the middle of the svartalf embassy. Grass and flowers had been planted in tasteful balance, leaving enough room for the children to run about and play hide-and-seek. Svartalf children are odd-looking little creatures, with their parents’ grey skin and absolutely enormous eyes—adorable, really. There were half a dozen kids in residence at the embassy of an age to play with Maggie, and all of them loved Mouse, who was engaging them all in a game of tag, lightly springing away from them and twisting and dodging despite all his mass of muscle.
Several svartalves were in the garden. They kept a polite physical and psychological distance from us, clearly savvy to the tension that currently existed between me and the old man.
“Are you insane?” Ebenezar asked me.
“I’m making a choice,” I said.
“You might as well get her a shirt with a series of bull’s-eyes on it,” he said. He kept his voice pitched too low for the children to hear him. “You raise that child near you, and you’re making her a target. My God, the vampires already know about her.”
“She was in a safe house far away from me for a long time,” I said. “It didn’t work out so well.”
“What was wrong with the Carpenters’ house?” he said. “Short of headquarters in Edinburgh, you couldn’t find a better-protected place. Why not leave her there?”
“Because her father doesn’t live there,” I said.
The old man looked up at the sky as though imploring the Almighty to give him patience. “You’re a damned fool.”
I ground my teeth. “You have a better idea?”
“She needs to be somewhere safe. Somewhere away from you. At least until such time as she shows potential talent of her own, so that she can learn to protect herself.”
“Assuming she ever does.”
“If she doesn’t, our world will get her killed.”
At that, I felt my own temper rising. “I guess you’d do it differently,” I said.
“I did do it differently,” he snapped. “I made sure your mother grew up far away from the dangers of my life.”
“How’d that work out?” I asked him. “Let’s ask Mom. Oh, wait. We can’t. She’s dead.”
There was a sudden silence. I’m not sure if the sunlight literally dimmed for a few seconds or not. But the svartalves suddenly drifted even farther away from us.
The old man’s voice was a quiet rumble.
“What did you say to me, boy?”
“She’s dead,” I said, enunciating. “Your daughter, who you stashed somewhere safe for her protection, is dead now. You have no stones to throw at me.”
The old man looked like something carven from old ivory. He said nothing.
“The monsters already did try to kill Maggie. And I stopped them,” I said. “And if they try again, I’ll stop them again. She doesn’t need somewhere safe. But she does need her dad.”
“How dare you,” the old man whispered.
“I might not be the best parent in the whole world,” I said. “But I’m here. I’m in her life. And there’s no substitute for that. None. There never was. There never will be.”
“You idiot,” Ebenezar said through clenched teeth. “Do you know what these hosts of yours are capable of?”
“Living up to their word,” I spat.
“Boy,” he said, “don’t push me.”
“Why? What are you going to do? Let me vanish into the foster care system? For my own good, of course.”
The old man’s head rocked back as if I’d slapped him.
“Mom died when I was born,” I said in a monotone. “Dad when I was coming up on kindergarten. And you just let me be alone.”
Ebenezar turned from me and hunched his shoulders.
“Maybe you thought you were protecting me,” I continued, without inflection. “But you were also abandoning me. And it hurt. It left scars. I didn’t even know you existed, and I was still angry with you.” I watched the children pursue Mouse. He could run for hours without getting winded. They were all having a ball. “She’s been through enough. I’m not putting her through that, too.”
The back of his neck and his bald pate were both turning red. I heard his knuckles pop as his blunt, strong hands clenched into fists.
“Boy,” he growled. “You aren’t thinking straight. You aren’t thinking this through.”
“One of us isn’t.”
“Your mother is dead,” Ebenezar said. “Your father is dead. The woman who bore your child is dead. And you are the common denominator. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see that it’s necessary to set your own feelings aside?”
I felt a flash of rage and pain so intense that for a second I thought I was about to lose control—and it had nothing to do with the Winter mantle.
“What I see,” I said, “is a little girl who needs her father to love her. I can’t do that if I’m not there.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But she’s my child. It’s my call.”
He shook his head.
“And since I’ve noticed that my life at times resembles a badly written Mexican soap opera,” I continued, “I want you to know something.”
“What?”
“I think that right now you’re considering protecting her by grabbing her and stashing her somewhere safe. If you go through with it, I’m going to take her back. Over your dead body if necessary, sir.”
The old man turned to stare at me, his face a thundercloud.
I stared back. I didn’t blink.
“Lad,” Ebenezar said. The faint burr of a Scots accent had entered his voice. “You’re walking somewhere you don’t want to go.”
“Not the first time. Not the last.”
The old man thrust out a pugnacious jaw and drew in a breath.
“Gentlemen,” said a new voice, deep and rich. “Gentlemen, excuse me.”
The old man and I both turned our glares on the intruder.
A svartalf stood before us, clad in a suit of dark blue silk. He was taller than Austri, and heavier with muscle. His expression was calm and absolutely resolute. “Gentlemen, you are guests in my home. This display of yours is unseemly at best.”
I blinked and looked around slowly. The play in the garden had stopped. The svartalf children had withdrawn to hide behind their parents. Maggie stood halfway between the other children and her family, poised on one foot as if set to flee, both her hands clutching desperately at Mouse’s mane. The big dog stood between the child and us, giving me a very disapproving look.